"Hypocrisy And Cruelty Are As American As The Flag"

Jesus loves those who can monetize His love

What TLC pitched as charming traditionalism was really a form of extremism. Before Duggar destroyed his life, he worked as a lobbyist for the Family Research Council, a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. The Duggars campaigned against abortion rights as a family well after they’d become famous. A year before the public learned of Duggar’s abusive past, his mother, Michelle Duggar, recorded a robocall against an anti-discrimination measure in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The measure, she claimed, would allow “males with past child-predator convictions that claim they are female to have a legal right to enter private areas that are reserved for women and girls.”

Not long afterward, Duggar admitted to molesting five girls as a teenager, including four of his sisters. The family stood by him — they had known and buried the story for years — but they lost their TV show. The right-wing former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee defended Josh after the molestation story broke in 2015. “They are no more perfect a family than any family, but their Christian witness is not marred in our eyes because following Christ is not a declaration of our perfection, but of HIS perfection,” Huckabee wrote on Facebook. That confession would not be Duggar’s last, though. He watched pornography; he cheated on his wife; he was very sorry. He disappeared from television, but TLC and the Duggars had money to make, so the network debuted another reality show, this one focused on his adult siblings. The family had become a spectacle; maybe it could no longer be anything else.

I should begin by saying that I’ve never watched an episode of “19 Kids and Counting” or anything else involving the Duggar family. The family’s rank hypocrisy, combined with TLC’s willingness to monetize that hypocrisy, was evident when TLC announced the series. It was a case of “reality television” being anything but genuine. I saw no reason to dignify the series by viewing it.

The Duggar family are the poster children for the “famous for being famous” phenomenon. Unfortunately, few seemed to understand what it was about the Duggar family that made them unique, save for their 19 children and their shameless willingness to put their lives on camera for money.

The parents struck a deal with TLC in which their youngest children, who were too young to provide consent, saw their private lives filmed daily. As if growing up in a fundamentalist Christian environment wasn’t confining enough, the cameras were a fence walling the children off from the world. They weren’t free to be children, not in any real sense, because the cameras were there to record their every thought, word, and deed.

The worst part of “19 Kids and Counting” was that, for the Duggars, it morphed from a lifestyle into a political movement. Somewhere along the line, they decided that they wanted to limit the freedoms of others in the same way they defined the freedoms of their children.

The cameras worked like a fence and kept the children inside while people gawked on the outside. That’s what it means to be a witness. The Duggars wanted to set an example to others, and TLC helped them do it for years. While the family performed for the camera, they involved themselves ever more deeply with the Christian right. Not content to limit the freedom of their children, they sought to limit the freedom of others. The long skirts, the overflowing household, and the early marriages of their children were never personal choices alone but lives they hoped to force on others.

What went unacknowledged for years was that the Duggar parents had known that one of their sons- Josh- had pedophilia and pornography problems. He pled guilty to molesting five girls- including four of his sisters. It came out as the story developed that the family had known of Josh’s “issue” for years but had chosen to bury it because…well, because there was money to be made.

“19 Kids and Counting” existed at the cultural intersection of hypocrisy and commerce. The audience saw a family that reflected the values many wished they could model in a simpler, less complicated world- and TLC laughed all the way to the bank.

What’s astonishing- but probably shouldn’t be- was the degree to which the Fundamentalist Christian community circled the wagons in defense of the Duggars. It almost didn’t seem to matter that Josh Duggar was accused of and pled guilty to sexually molesting underage girls. To their way of thinking, good, God-fearing Christians were being persecuted, and it was their duty to stand up for their own.

It’s too bad no one thought to stand up for the Duggar children who were too young to consent to having their privacy violated for public entertainment. So, the viewing public was privy to what should have been their private pain. Instead, like everything else about “19 Kids and Counting,” TLC and the Duggars exploited that pain for ratings.

Because if there’s one thing that fundamentalist Christians do exceedingly well, it’s the monetization of pain and suffering. The diminished well-being of the Duggar’s young children was merely a cost of doing business.

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